Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is Compton’s crowned prince. Coming from a neighborhood where he saw the South Central riots at age 4 and his first murder at age 5, he rose to worldwide fame with an opus about that very neighborhood—his 2012 major-label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city. Drawing from the city’s rich hip-hop tradition, he layered his tracks with classic samples and poetic, dense, socially conscious lyrics. He followed it in 2014 with the jazz-laced To Pimp a Butterfly and in 2017 with the culturally complex DAMN. Each LP found him stretching his rhymes into new theatrical patterns in order to address the problems impacting the black community in Compton and around the United States.